1. There are three monsters at the root of contemporary horror: The vampire, the thing without a name, and the werewolf.
2. There are two kinds of evil these monsters mix and practice: Evil from without and evil from within; evil as an adversary, and evil as personal weakness.
3. The vampire represents a supremely powerful extrinsic evil tinged with sexual appetite. His principal motivation is a hunger that can only be sated in terms of someone else's suffering & loss.
4. The thing without a name represents the social mutant or the Other. The reader finds him at once repulsive and yet sympathizes with his plight. His principal motivation is to find acceptance and love within society, but his repulsiveness guarantees failure. Failure makes him violent.
5. The werewolf represents someone whose inner evil becomes unleashed. His principal motivation is to protect his innocence and to keep Mr. Hyde out of the public view--but he might just enjoy the murderous and animal indulgences he takes in secret.
"If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that [works of horror] always do their best work on two levels. On top is the "gross-out" level...But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance--a moving, rhythmic search. And what it's looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. ... it is in search of ... the secret den of the Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish inquisition...but perhaps most frequently and successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller." - p. 3
"The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of--as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out. The Stranger makes us nervous ... but we love to try on his face in secret." - p. 3
"Never mind that [the aliens from Invasion of the Body Snatchers] can't appreciate La Traviata or Moby Dick ... My God!--they don't mow their lawns or replace the pane of garage glass that got broken when the kid down the street batted a baseball through it."
"Terror--what Hunter S. Thompson calls 'fear and loathing'--often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal--if it hits you around the heart--then it lodges in the memory as a complete set." - p. 7-8 This is said in reference to memories that lodge in everyone's memory, such as 9/11, Kennedy's assassination, etc.
"Horror in real life is an emotion that one grapples with--as I grappled with the realization that the Russians had beaten us into space--all alone. It is a combat waged in the secret recesses of the heart." -p. 11
"Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone." - p. 12
"Horror fiction doesn't necessarily have to be non-scientific. Curt Slodmak's novel Donavan's Brain moves from a scientific basis to outright horror (as did Alien)." - p. 16
"Exactly what is a monster? Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic." - p. 31
"What about the freaks in the circus? The carny aberrations observed by the light of the naked hundred-watt bulb?...A majority of people considered them monstrous in their day." - p. 33 cf. Freaks, the film.
"Take fat. How fat does a person have to be before he or she passes over the line and into a perversion of the human form severe enough to be called a monstrosity?" - p. 36
"If I Was a Teenage Werewolf is, psychologically, that old dream of having your pants fall down when you stand up during homeroom period to salute the flag, taken to its most nightmarish extreme...then I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is a sick parable of the total glandular breakdown. It is a movie for every fifteen-year-old who ever stood in front of her or his mirror in the morning looking nervously at the fresh pimple that surfaced in the night and realizing glumly that even Stri-Dex Medicated Pads weren't going to solve the problem no matter what Dick Clark said." - p. 46
"All of these books [Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde] have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story: secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid." - p. 51
"All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from a act of free and conscious will--a conscious decision to do evil--and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from the outside like a stroke of lightning." - p. 64
"Perhaps the best tale of inside evil ever written is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," where the murder is committed out of pure evil." - p. 64
"It is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil so effective when they are good." - p. 64
Frankenstein
"Shelley's story is a Shakespearean tragedy, its classical unity broken only by Ms. Shelley's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies--is it in Victor's hubris...or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation...?" - p. 54
"What has turned Frankenstein into a movie not just once but again and again and again? One possibility is that the storyline...usually contains the wonderful dichotomy that Mary Shelley built into her story: on the one hand, the horror writer is an agent of the norm, he or she wants us to watch for the mutant, and we feel Victor Frankenstein's horror and disgust at the relentless, charnel creature he has made. But on the other hand, we grasp the fact of the creature's innocence and the author's infatuation with the tabula rasa idea." - p. 59
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
"Gaze, if you will, on the face of the real Werewolf: His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde." - p. 71
"It is Dr. Henry Jekyll who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisy." - p. 64
"Somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast." - p. 73, in regards to what Enfield meant by "He gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point."
"[Stevenson] gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious minds--or, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. ... On Jekyll's side, all things are in order and life foes its steady Apollonian round. On the other side, Dionysius prances unfettered." - p. 74
"Stevenson, here and in other places, describes Hyde as 'ape-like.' He suggests that Hyde ... is a step backward along the evolutionary scale, something vicious in the human makeup ... and isn't that what really frightens us in the myth of the Werewolf?" - p. 75
Dracula
"Bram Stoker's Dracula seems a remarkable achievement to me because it humanizes the outside evil concept; we grasp it in a familiar way Lovecraft never allowed, and we can feel its texture. It is an adventure story, but it never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Varney the Vampyre." - p. 65
"Much of the evil embodied by the Count is a perverse sexual evil. Stoker revitalized the vampire legend largely by writing a novel which fairly pants with sexual energy." -p. 66
"Anyway, the point made in regard to vapirism applies just as well to mesmerism: the 'culminating burst of pleasure' [a supposed hypnotism-induced orgasm] was all right because it came from outside; she experiencing the pleasure could not be held responsible." - p. 68
1. There are three monsters at the root of contemporary horror: The vampire, the thing without a name, and the werewolf.
2. There are two kinds of evil these monsters mix and practice: Evil from without and evil from within; evil as an adversary, and evil as personal weakness.
3. The vampire represents a supremely powerful extrinsic evil tinged with sexual appetite. His principal motivation is a hunger that can only be sated in terms of someone else's suffering & loss.
4. The thing without a name represents the social mutant or the Other. The reader finds him at once repulsive and yet sympathizes with his plight. His principal motivation is to find acceptance and love within society, but his repulsiveness guarantees failure. Failure makes him violent.
5. The werewolf represents someone whose inner evil becomes unleashed. His principal motivation is to protect his innocence and to keep Mr. Hyde out of the public view--but he might just enjoy the murderous and animal indulgences he takes in secret.
"If there is any truth or worth to the danse macabre, it is simply that [works of horror] always do their best work on two levels. On top is the "gross-out" level...But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance--a moving, rhythmic search. And what it's looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. ... it is in search of ... the secret den of the Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish inquisition...but perhaps most frequently and successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller." - p. 3
"The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of--as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out. The Stranger makes us nervous ... but we love to try on his face in secret." - p. 3
"Never mind that [the aliens from Invasion of the Body Snatchers] can't appreciate La Traviata or Moby Dick ... My God!--they don't mow their lawns or replace the pane of garage glass that got broken when the kid down the street batted a baseball through it."
"Terror--what Hunter S. Thompson calls 'fear and loathing'--often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal--if it hits you around the heart--then it lodges in the memory as a complete set." - p. 7-8 This is said in reference to memories that lodge in everyone's memory, such as 9/11, Kennedy's assassination, etc.
"Horror in real life is an emotion that one grapples with--as I grappled with the realization that the Russians had beaten us into space--all alone. It is a combat waged in the secret recesses of the heart." -p. 11
"Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone." - p. 12
"Horror fiction doesn't necessarily have to be non-scientific. Curt Slodmak's novel Donavan's Brain moves from a scientific basis to outright horror (as did Alien)." - p. 16
"Exactly what is a monster? Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic." - p. 31
"What about the freaks in the circus? The carny aberrations observed by the light of the naked hundred-watt bulb?...A majority of people considered them monstrous in their day." - p. 33 cf. Freaks, the film.
"Take fat. How fat does a person have to be before he or she passes over the line and into a perversion of the human form severe enough to be called a monstrosity?" - p. 36
"If I Was a Teenage Werewolf is, psychologically, that old dream of having your pants fall down when you stand up during homeroom period to salute the flag, taken to its most nightmarish extreme...then I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is a sick parable of the total glandular breakdown. It is a movie for every fifteen-year-old who ever stood in front of her or his mirror in the morning looking nervously at the fresh pimple that surfaced in the night and realizing glumly that even Stri-Dex Medicated Pads weren't going to solve the problem no matter what Dick Clark said." - p. 46
"All of these books [Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde] have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story: secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid." - p. 51
"All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from a act of free and conscious will--a conscious decision to do evil--and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from the outside like a stroke of lightning." - p. 64
"Perhaps the best tale of inside evil ever written is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," where the murder is committed out of pure evil." - p. 64
"It is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil so effective when they are good." - p. 64
Frankenstein
"Shelley's story is a Shakespearean tragedy, its classical unity broken only by Ms. Shelley's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies--is it in Victor's hubris...or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation...?" - p. 54
"What has turned Frankenstein into a movie not just once but again and again and again? One possibility is that the storyline...usually contains the wonderful dichotomy that Mary Shelley built into her story: on the one hand, the horror writer is an agent of the norm, he or she wants us to watch for the mutant, and we feel Victor Frankenstein's horror and disgust at the relentless, charnel creature he has made. But on the other hand, we grasp the fact of the creature's innocence and the author's infatuation with the tabula rasa idea." - p. 59
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
"Gaze, if you will, on the face of the real Werewolf: His name, gentle reader, is Edward Hyde." - p. 71
"It is Dr. Henry Jekyll who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisy." - p. 64
"Somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast." - p. 73, in regards to what Enfield meant by "He gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point."
"[Stevenson] gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious minds--or, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. ... On Jekyll's side, all things are in order and life foes its steady Apollonian round. On the other side, Dionysius prances unfettered." - p. 74
"Stevenson, here and in other places, describes Hyde as 'ape-like.' He suggests that Hyde ... is a step backward along the evolutionary scale, something vicious in the human makeup ... and isn't that what really frightens us in the myth of the Werewolf?" - p. 75
Dracula
"Bram Stoker's Dracula seems a remarkable achievement to me because it humanizes the outside evil concept; we grasp it in a familiar way Lovecraft never allowed, and we can feel its texture. It is an adventure story, but it never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Varney the Vampyre." - p. 65
"Much of the evil embodied by the Count is a perverse sexual evil. Stoker revitalized the vampire legend largely by writing a novel which fairly pants with sexual energy." -p. 66
"Anyway, the point made in regard to vapirism applies just as well to mesmerism: the 'culminating burst of pleasure' [a supposed hypnotism-induced orgasm] was all right because it came from outside; she experiencing the pleasure could not be held responsible." - p. 68